Monday, March 12, 2001

San Diego Researchers Build a Fast Wireless Network for a Remote Inland Area By FLORENCE OLSEN University of California researchers have built a wireless computer network that could become a model for bringing high-speed Internet access to some of the most rugged and remote regions of the country. The network has been designed to provide fast Internet links to several tribal reservations and to research sites that are up to 35 miles away, as the crow flies, from the San Diego campuses of the University of California and San Diego State University. The three-year, $2.3-million research project involves building a solar-powered, wireless radio network to link the San Diego County coastline, where the research universities are located, to the mountainous eastern region of the county. Scientists say the network is unusual both because of the technology it uses and for the different research activities in astronomy, geophysics, and ecology that it makes possible. The experimental system could help solve one of networking's biggest challenges. Network researchers have largely succeeded in building an ever-faster Internet, says Hans-Werner Braun, a research scientist at the University of California at San Diego who is the principal investigator for the project, which is known as the High-Performance Wireless Research and Education Network. But the Internet's builders have done less well, he says, at finding ways to provide high-speed Internet access everywhere. "Ubiquity was one of the things we didn't do a good job at providing." Mr. Braun and his colleagues have been busy since last August taking apart high-speed wireless radios and rebuilding them so they operate on solar and battery power instead of 110-volt electric power. Electricity is not available in some of remote places where the wireless network provides high-speed Internet access. Solar panels collect the energy needed to recharge the radios' batteries. Without batteries, Mr. Braun says, the network would cease to work at night and during snowstorms. One potential problem with using solar arrays worries him, though. "People shoot them for target practice," he says. All of the network's parts are readily available, including the wireless radios, which operate on a free, unlicensed frequency. Networking research used to be focused almost entirely on "pushing the edge" of technology, says Ramesh Rao, the director of the Center for Wireless Communications at U.C.-San Diego. The San Diego research is going beyond that, he says, "by reaching out to user communities." This emphasis on "applications," he adds, is indicative of a maturing of the technology. The Mount Laguna Observatory, operated by the San Diego State astronomy department and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is located in the rugged, eastern part of the county, near the La Jolla, Pala, and Rincon Indian reservations. Previously, the only link between university computers and the observatory was a single phone line, which was so slow as to be practically unusable for transferring large astronomical images. Instead, scientists had to use bulky computer tapes to transfer their data. Now the researchers have connected the observatory, as well as the Pala Learning Center, to the wireless backbone. The center, which is a community library, previously had just one phone line for Internet access. "The kids had to take turns," says Doretta Musick, the center's director. "Some of them would get so disgusted that they'd just leave because it would take too long" to get access to the Internet. Video cameras have been set up on six computers in the learning center, she adds, and student volunteers from U.C.-San Diego were set last week to begin using the high-speed Internet connection to offer tutoring in algebra to Pala high-school students. Besides linking the Mount Laguna Observatory to the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the wireless backbone provides a reliable, high-speed connection for transferring seismic data between U.C.-San Diego and a remote earthquake-detection site operated by its Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The wireless network also creates the first high-speed link between San Diego State and two ecological reserves in a distant part of the county, where the university maintains field stations with instruments for imaging and remote sensing of the environment. "We are trying so many different things at the same time that, sooner or later," Mr. Braun says, "we're going to run out of hours in the day." Thomas J. Greene, the senior program director responsible for advanced networking-infrastructure programs at the National Science Foundation, says the research network is a practical laboratory for studying high-speed wireless Internet access. "Some of the issues that have been studied quite completely in isolation [may] get cleared up by people putting all the pieces together," he says. An N.S.F. grant is financing the research. Other participants in the project are Frank Vernon, the co-principal investigator, who is a geophysicist at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the Scripps Institution; Paul Etzel, a professor of astronomy at San Diego State; Sedra Shapiro, the associate director of the College of Sciences at San Diego State; Geneva Lofton Fitzsimmons, the American Indian outreach coordinator at U.C.-San Diego; and researchers at both U.C.-San Diego's Center for Wireless Communications and the California Institute of Technology's Mount Palomar Observatory. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

Former U.S. treasury secretary Summers is named next president of Harvard U. 2 professors at Queens College discriminated against black student, appeals court finds Following its rivals, U. of Pennsylvania sweetens the pot for graduate students Among big sports programs, gender equity is No. 1 reason for cutting men's teams, report says Vote reaffirming U. of Wisconsin's affirmative-action goals raises protocol questions After firing its basketball coach, Texas Tech is reportedly talking to Bob Knight U. of South Florida ousts its athletics director; role in bias inquiry at issue Irish universities call off events and limit travel to halt spread of disease San Diego researchers build a fast wireless network for a remote inland area Harvard U. offers online course "tastings" to its alumni